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OK, time to take care of some business, tie up some loose ends.

First, I never revealed the band behind the mystery song I wrote about in October. Here’s a clue: If I tell you, you’re gonna go “a-ha!”

Next, some good news: Rosie O’Donnell’s variety show tanked in the ratings last week, and won’t be picked up as a series! My fears were unfounded.

So were my fears about Sarah Palin. Her schtick didn’t play as well as I thought it would. Are Americans getting smarter?

I still have no explanation for all the references to pandas in my blog.

I still haven’t looked at a copy of the revamped Hartford Courant, and probably never will.

That’s because I’m moving out of state in a couple weeks to take a new job in Baltimore. So I’m putting the blog on pause in the meantime.

I cannot tell you all how much I appreciate your visiting here to read my random ravings, but it has meant so much to me during my “between-jobs” period of 2008. I have the greatest, and smartest, and funniest friends anyone could ever hope for.

During my downtime, you can always check out my sister Joan Beal’s live blog on facebook. A lot of people told me they loved her posts here, so there’s more where that came from…

I’ll keep you updated on my new life once I get settled, so check back here. I can’t promise I’ll have the time (or the ideas) to keep it as up-to-date, but I’ll try. And please come visit me in Baltimore — the crabs are on me (…maybe I should rephrase that…)

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I CAN’T imagine that kids today will even remember, say 30 years from now, the first single they ever downloaded. It’s just not the same as when I was a kid, when I’d head to Caldor or to Cutler’s in New Haven and hope, hope, hope they’d have copies of that great song I’d just heard on the radio.

I’d scan the singles chart, find the the number of the song I wanted, and peek at the corresponding record slot — would it be filled or empty? It was strangely exhilarating — or maybe I was just a really boring kid. Either way, I loved music, and there was something about this physical hunt for songs that thrilled me. Not to sound like a nostalgic old fart, but it was way better than hitting the search button at iTunes.

So today’s blog entry is the request of a friend and fellow music lover who still collects 45s today (as a former DJ, I know the importance of taking requests.) He suggested a post on the first 45 I ever bought. I think he suggested it at my expense, because he knows it’s a bit embarrassing. But here goes.

First, context: I loved (and still do love) pop music. Second, I grew up in a house with no Beatles albums (although my older sister had “The Chipmunks Sing The Beatles Hits” LP — for years, when I heard actual Beatles songs, I thought they were playing at the wrong speed…) Third, music kinda sucked in the early ’70s, so my choices were limited. Fourth, I was probably 8 years old at the time — long before I learned the difference between cool and uncool music.

OK, enough stalling. The way I remember it, the first 45 I ever bought (the first of hundreds and hundreds I would buy over the next decade) was “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando & Dawn. (For bonus embarrassment points: I even watched their variety show in the ’70s.)

In my defense, it was the top-selling single in 1973 — someone in my house had to buy it. That May, it sold 3 million copies in just three weeks! And it’s a song that wouldn’t die (its resurgence in later years totally ruined the Iranian hostage crisis and the first Gulf War for me…)

So there ya go. Sad, I know. But c’mon, “Tie A Yellow Ribbon” is still a cooler first single than a download of “Ooops!… I Did It Again,” right? Right?

(Don’t leave me hanging here. Share your story — especially if your first 45 was crappier than mine, like “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero” or “Shannon.”)

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OK, how come:

• Vic Mackey has a new job and I don’t?
• Blockbuster still exists?
• I have to keep hearing about Britney Spears’ comeback EVERY OTHER FUCKING YEAR?
• I already have Obama fatigue? Really, I only have so much hope.
• Black Friday gets more attention than Thanksgiving?
• People invite me to be facebook friends, and then don’t respond when I send them a message?
• Bush gets to pardon anyone?
• I’m the only one who remembers “Saved By Zero” was a Fixx song?
• Mormons don’t consider polygamy to be same-sex marriage?
• The Beatles and iTunes can’t work it out if all you need is love?

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I LOVE television. It just doesn’t love me back.

Over the past few years, it’s become clear that TV programmers don’t really care about guys like me, guys in their 40s who get to choose what they watch, rather than pretend to enjoy whatever their wives are watching. The only eyeballs network execs seem to worry about today belong to teenagers and middle-aged women.

And tonight, I’m losing yet another one of the few shows I love: “The Shield” is ending its amazing seven-season run on FX, and I’ll be watching it live (the last time I actually watched a live TV show was the Sopranos’ finale in June 2007). I can’t wait to see what happens to Vic Mackey and the pathetic remains of the Strike Team (and Lloyd the Teen Serial Killer-To-Be better not touch Dutch).

So now three of my favorite shows of the decade have ended: “The Wire,” “The Sopranos” and “The Shield.” And what’s on the horizon to fill the void? “Rosie Live”!! Yep, Rosie O’Donnell hosts a variety show Wednesday, one night after “The Shield” finale, and NBC is considering turning the special into a series. Where’s a dirty cop when you need him?

And Rosie’s just the tip of the iceberg (albeit a pretty big tip.) Take CBS. The network hasn’t aired one show that appeals to me in a long time. I don’t give a shit about crime scene investigators or naval criminal investigators or ghost whisperers or cold cases or numb3rs or criminal minds or mentalists.

ABC and NBC and Fox and that CW one aren’t much better. I don’t care about “Law and Order,” so a third of NBC’s lineup is irrelevant to me. “Grey’s Anatomy” makes me ill (ironically), “Chuck” and “Reaper” cancel each other out, and I can’t even imagine spending a minute with gossip girls or desperate housewives.

Some shows do try to appeal to a 43-year-old guy, but they don’t deliver. I watched the first season of “Heroes” on HD DVD (another guy thing) and thought it was a convoluted mess without any focus or point. And that was the good season. I enjoyed the first season of “Prison Break” but didn’t care enough about these people to follow them once they prison broke. I couldn’t even make it to the end of the pilot of “House.” I still watch “24,” but only to keep my eye-rolling muscles in shape. I’ll admit to enjoying “Smallville” and “Supernatural” but they’re geared for people half — or even a third — my age. “How I Met Your Mother” is nowhere near as cool as it thinks it is. “The Big Bang Theory” is mildly amusing, even though that breakout nerd seems to think he’s Lilith from “Cheers.” And I have no use for “Life on Mars” — I liked the original British series and can’t imagine it’s any better with Harvey Keitel.

I stopped watching reality shows about 200 reality shows ago. I know way too much about “American Idol” without ever having seen the show. I don’t care how much money is in that suitcase. And watching celebrities dance is my idea of hell.

So what does that leave me with, other than a lot of space on my DVR? Well, “The Office” and “30 Rock,” the two funniest shows on TV right now; “Rescue Me,” which got a bit too repetitive last season but still entertains; and “Lost,” an exasperating show I gave up on a couple years ago, only to come back just in time to watch it hit its creative highpoint (seasons 3 and 4). And that’s pretty much it. (And “Lost” and “Rescue Me” don’t even return until next year.) I’m not even holding out much hope for Joss Whedon’s upcoming show “Dollhouse,” which seems doomed to the same Friday-night fate as his “Firefly.”

What it all boils down to is that the shows I love aren’t like anything else on TV. “Buffy,” “Arrested Development,” “The Wire,” “The Sopranos,” “The Shield” — they were all unique. And TV programmers aren’t big on unique. Not when they can get another hit just by sticking the letters C, S and I into a title.

So whether or not Vic Mackey dies tonight, I’ll be sad. Because another original is gone, another show for guys like me is over, and millions of people are perfectly happy watching Rosie O’Donnell introduce tap dancers.

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PEOPLE always chant it, and it’s simply accepted as a matter of fact, but it’s bullshit. The U.S.A. is not No. 1. It can’t be. Not when so many people living here are living in hell.

With all the crap that’s happened in our country over the past decade, you really only have to point to one event to prove that America is not the greatest country in the world: Katrina. I’m pissed the whole disaster got politicized, because the red-vs.-blue debate pulled our attention away from a sad truth: There are great numbers of people in this country whose poverty is killing them.

Every week, I see two reminders of this sad truth. I’ve been tutoring two fifth-graders in New Haven, Conn., two boys at a college-prep middle school for inner-city, mostly minority youths. I grew up outside New Haven, and figured it would be a good way for a relatively well-off white guy to give a little back, and to see if teaching was something worth exploring careerwise.

What I expected wasn’t what I got. I figured I’d be tutoring two kids who were struggling with math and reading. Turns out my two 11-year-olds are pretty bright. They both read well, and they both love math (one even declared that he’s a “math nerd” but that he hides it because being smart isn’t cool.) They talk about their college ambitions occasionally, and between lessons they sing and dance. They’re relatively happy kids.

But every week, they remind me of what’s fundamentally wrong with their world, and our world. Every week, without fail, they talk unprovoked about the loved ones they’ve lost to bullets or to prison. A few weeks ago, I showed up for class and one of the boys had more bad news — his cousin had just been shot and killed that week. He was devastated, obviously, and we talked about it for a while. My other student shared his own story — his 14-year-old brother had been shot in the head while riding his bike (somehow, he lived).

Teaching math and reading seemed irrelevant at this point of our session. I momentarily thought of telling them that knowledge and college could be their ticket out of this life of violence, but I stopped myself. Even in my head, that just sounded like patronizing white-guy bullshit — these kids are gonna have to dodge bullets for another seven years before they can get to college, and that’s if they can even afford it.

I asked the two boys — remember, they’re 11 years old — how they could end this cycle of violence. In unison, they answered immediately: “Leave.”

“You shouldn’t have to leave your home to be safe,” I said. But “home” must not mean the same thing to me as it does to them. Not if they fear it, not if they want to run away from it.

This past weekend, the boy whose cousin was shot dead broke my heart a little more. He told me he can’t wait till next year, when he’s old enough to join “the battle” and help get revenge on those who killed his cousin. I’m there to teach math and reading, to keep these kids on the path to college, and he’s talking about “the battle.” That’s the path he envisions for himself, at least for the immediate future. College is an abstract goal, the war is real.

I reminded the boy about how sad he is to have lost his cousin, and that even his cousin’s killers have people who love them and would be heartbroken if they were killed for the sake of revenge. I talked to him about the futility of this self-perpetuating violence.

But what the fuck do I know about this world they live in? I just know that it exists, and it’s hell. And it’s in the same city as Yale University, one of the greatest learning institutions in the world. And it’s a couple towns over from where I grew up alongside beautiful farmland. And it’s in Connecticut, the wealthiest state in the country. And it’s in the U.S.A., one of the greatest nations in the world.

And as long as this hell exists, we don’t get to brag about being No. 1. Not when we should be trying so much harder.

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I LOVE how movies can take you back to another time and place, I bygone era you might have lived through — or only ever heard about.

I just watched one such film and was transported all the way back in time — to the early 2000s. It was “Spider-Man,” a movie that has aged worse than guacamole at a summer picnic.

How can it be? The thing is only six years old — they’re still making sequels — yet it already feels like a relic from another time.

Where do I begin? How ’bout the wrestling scene, Peter Parker’s coming-out party as Spider-Man. It’s the first time we really get to see him in action, and he’s wrestling? With Randy “Macho Man” Savage?? Somewhere offscreen, did Superman spin the world back to the 1980s?

Then there’s the scene in Times Square, where folks are celebrating “World Unity Day” or something. Who’s entertaining the crowd? None other than recording artist Macy Gray! No, she’s not singing that one song you kinda remember by her from when she was popular for a few months. It’s some tuneless crap called “My Nutmeg Phantasy” (worst song title ever?). Don’t worry if you forgot that she was in the movie — even she doesn’t remember being in it.

It doesn’t help matters that during the drawn-out Times Square scene, we see a ginormous, conspicuously product-placed billboard for some old-timey company called Cingular (kids, ask your parents), or that the Green Goblin shows up and wreaks havoc on New Yorkers. (Crime in Times Square? How retro!)

And what’s with all this newspaper stuff throughout this flick. Like, Peter is a photographer for the school paper. Do schools even have school papers anymore? And he’s using a film camera! Dork. Later, he goes to work for the Daily Bugle, a newspaper that’s actually hiring people! Talk about bygone days …

And I swear, this has to be the last movie to use the spinning-front-page newspaper montage for exposition. Seriously? Newspapers aren’t even how moviegoers get their news anymore.

Another way this superhero flick shows its age? There’s only one villain! You can’t get away with that today: “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight” have roughly 35 villains between them. Even last year’s “Spider-Man 3″ upped the enemy count. A superhero movie with only one bad guy won’t fly with today’s ADHD audiences.

Right to the end, “Spider-Man” dates itself. The crappy closing credit songs sound even worse than they did in 2002, which is saying something. Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger “sings” “Hero” in that croaking, ’90s Pearl Jammy way, and Sum 41 (that’s the number of minutes they were popular) sound like warmed-over Beastie Boys. Great stuff if you want to clear a theater quickly but don’t want to yell “Fire.”

What about the oft-repeated mantra of the movie, its theme, if you will? “With great power comes great responsibility.” After two terms of George W. Bush, we now know that’s bullshit.

It’s funny — an early trailer for the film prominently (and unfortunately) featured the World Trade Center. Supposedly, the WTC scene was never intended for the final film. But it might as well have been included. “Spider-Man” feels so last century already.

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AS someone who has heard his relatively simple six-letter last name pronounced about 47 different ways, I always try to make sure I get other people’s names right. But there are a bunch of celebrities whose names I’ve mangled over the years (I thought it was Charlize “thur-RONE,” for example.)

It’s still somewhat common for actors and singers to take easier-to-pronounce (and often less-Jewy) stage names. (Would Jon Stewart be as popular if he were still Jonathan Leibowitz? Probably, actually — he makes it no secret he’s Jewish, and a lot of people think his last name is Daily anyway. But you get my point.)

So I give these folks below a lot of credit for sticking with these names (most of which I’ve mispronounced — or just completely avoided saying out loud):

ACTORS

←Mary Lynn Rajskub: Surly “Chloe” on “24.” You know, the only person at CTU with a personality. It’s “rice-cub,” by the way (which is a lot easier than saying “surly Chloe” ten times fast.)

Chiwetel Ejiofor: Great actor who played a terrific bad guy in “Serenity.” HEAR his name pronounced here

Ryan Phillippe: I thought it was “fill-EEP.” Doesn’t that sound classier anyway?

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje: “Mr. Eko” on “Lost.” The hyphen is actually a rest stop.

Saoirse Ronan: Some say it’s “SEER-shuh,” others say it’s “SER-shuh.” Pick one and stick with it, or I’ll just keep calling you “sow-eerse.”

Don Cheadle: Am I the only one who wants to say “CHEE-ad-ull?”

Shia LeBeouf: I wouldn’t have even bothered learning this one, but it looks like this guy isn’t going away any time soon.

MUSICIANS

John Mayer: As in McCheese, not Oscar. (Geez, am I hungry or what?)

Sufjan Stevens: That’s “SOOF-yahn” to you.

Ciara: It’s “Sierra.” Her last name is pronounced “  .”

→Sade:  I remember everyone pronouncing her name “shar-day” back in the shar-day. Apparently, even her record company printed “pronounced shar-day” after her name on the labels of her first releases in the ’80s. But it’s “sha-day,” as in “Sha” Na Na. Hey — now there’s a great idea for a collaboration!

(BONUS: As long as I’m embarrassing myself, I used to think grunge band Mudhoney’s name was pronounced “mud-hoe-knee.” Sad, huh?)

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I’M announcing to you all right now that I’m retiring from blogging so I can concentrate on keeping track of young celebrities who announce their retirements.

Take Joaquin Phoenix. Please. To rehab, preferably. Late last month, the 34-year-old Oscar-nominated actor formerly known as Leaf announced (well, mumbled and slurred, actually) that he was leaving acting to focus on his music. I don’t think Phoenix even had the reporter in focus when he announced his decision. (There’s a “Walk The Line” joke in there somewhere.)

A week ago, on a red carpet, he made sure dyslexics got his message too, with “Bye! Good” written on his fists.

Don’t worry, Joaquin fans — this Phoenix will rise again. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that young celebrities who announce their retirements are usually back to work before we can even start missing them.

Like superstar rapper Jay-Z. He made huge news in 2003 when he announced he was retiring from recording at the age of 33. Wonder whatever happened to that guy.

Daniel Day Lewis announced he was leaving acting in the late ’90s (he did qualify his retirement with a “semi-”) to focus on woodworking and shoemaking in Italy. Midlife crisis much?

How ’bout M.I.A.? The Sri Lankan rapper announced at this year’s Bonnaroo that she was pulling the plug on her career of being splooged over by music critics and making albums that no one else heard. Turned out she was just pregnant, and then a song of hers got popular because of the “Pineapple Express” trailer and voila — she was back on the job! M.I.A., my ass.

Four years ago, Hugh Grant said in a charmingly befuddled way that he was retiring because, for him, film acting is a “miserable experience.” Try it from our end, Hugh.

Eminem announced in 2005 that he would be taking a break from performing to focus on producing, and that his “Encore” disc was “certainly the cap on this part of his career,” as his manager put it. But would he retire? Slim chance, Slim Shady. Look for his new CD, “Relapse,” under your Christmas tree.

Sean Penn announced his retirement from acting in the early ’90s and was never seen again — except for “Carlito’s Way,”  “Dead Man Walking” and the 20 or so other movies he’s been in since. And who retires from acting and then does a couple episodes of “Friends”?

Everyone should take a cue from Clint Eastwood. The guy cut back on acting years ago to focus on directing, and he hasn’t acted for any other director in more than 15 years. But did he ever feel the need to tell the world? No. There were no announcements, no photo ops, no messages scrawled on his hands. He just kinda slid over into directing without calling much attention to himself — he did it so quietly and confidently that few people even noticed he wasn’t acting that much anymore.

So, Joaquin: Act, don’t act. Work, don’t work. Stay, go away. But show us, don’t tell us. Let your work speak for itself. And if it’s good, we’ll pay attention.

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YESTERDAY, for one day at least, everybody had to have a copy of their newspaper. People waited in long lines to buy them, newsstands ran out of copies early in the morning, and subscribers had their papers stolen from their doorsteps. Everybody had to have a memento from this historic election — proof that it indeed happened, proof that they were there when it happened.

Customers wait outside the Washington Post building Wednesday afternoon for special editions of the newspaper. (Kevin Clark/The Washington Post )

It was a reminder to me of what newspapers mean to people, and of what they really do best — document in words and pictures the history of our world, the history of what happened the day before. They are a daily souvenir of our life. And when our favorite team wins a championship, when the nation is attacked by terrorists, when voters elect their first nonwhite president, we want the hard evidence in the form of a newspaper. DVR’d newscasts and Web printouts won’t do.

Newspapers are the greatest medium for recording this incremental history as it happens, day by day. But, for some reason, the executives running newspapers decided a while back that people already know what happened yesterday and don’t need to read all about it, and that they would rather have a daily crystal ball that tells them what’s gonna happen next. (I’ve written about this upsetting trend before.)

At The Hartford Courant, where I worked for nearly 10 years, we couldn’t write headlines or stories that told people what actually happened. We had to be “forward-looking” and stir up emotions with overblown, melodramatic and preferably alliterative headlines. The argument was that “readers already know what happened by the time the paper comes out, so you have to tell them something new.”

Therefore, “8 Die In Mall Shooting” is an unacceptable headline, but “Mall Massacre” is great, as is “Could It Happen At Your Mall?” I remember the day of the Madrid train bombing in 2004 — another historic day. I wasn’t allowed to write the headline “191 Killed In Train Bombings.” The front-page banner headline we used was “Al-Qaida Or ETA?” Huh? ETA? What did the train’s arrival time have to do with anything? Oh, ETA was a terrorist group suspected in the bombings. So, we went with a screaming question head that told readers little, even if they knew what ETA was. I asked then and I ask now: What is wrong with documenting, for history’s sake, exactly what happened yesterday?

I haven’t seen yesterday’s Courant (I still haven’t looked at a Courant since its redesign), but it wouldn’t surprise me to see a headline like “2012 Campaign Gets Underway” or “Is America Now Ready For A Latino President?”

I remember finding old, yellowed newspapers in a bedroom closet when I was a little boy. I vaguely remember them, but I think they were about Kennedy’s election or his assassination. In any case, they were historical records of historic days, saved by my parents for posterity.

That is what newspapers are to people. Unfortunately for newspaper publishers, every day isn’t as monumental as this Tuesday was. But that’s the cool thing about documenting history — you never know when the next monumental day is coming. Newspapers have to be ready, with the best writers and editors and photographers on hand, because history can happen at any time. And what happened yesterday can really matter to people.

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TODAY, the Real Americans are probably still wondering why so many people have blind faith that one person can miraculously change the world.

They’re probably wondering why so many people believe that this guy with Middle Eastern ties holds the key to their future, and can lead them to a promised land.

The Real Americans are probably wondering why so many people believe in a guy who has befriended sinners and folks of questionable character.

They’re probably wondering why so many people believe he will help care for the sick, and that he will put a spotlight on those left behind.

The Real Americans are probably wondering why so many people believe that this man, often persecuted because he is “different,” will try to bring more peace to the world.

Seriously, who would believe crazy shit like this?